How my Grandmother became Mary Christmas
Ho, Ho, Ho, Mary Christmas!
Stories grow larger every time they are told. This is especially true for Christmas stories, the kind with which I am most familiar. Still, this particular Christmas story has a rather humble beginning. It starts with my grandmother, when she was still a high school student named Mary Smith, meeting my grandfather, a basketball star with mischief in his eyes. She sized him up, and found that he just might be worth her time. And so, not long after, Mary Smith said “I do” with Glenn Christmas, cementing her identity as a season's greeting for the rest of her jolly life.
When I knew her, Mary Christmas had already established herself as a larger-than-life kind of figure, a patron saint of baking, embroidery and Russellville, Kentucky, roughly in that order. Every year around this time, I began to bubble with anticipation for our visit to Nana’s house, the only house I knew where Santa Claus would stop by a few days early to visit his old friend Mary Christmas. We would make the trip down to Logan County, and there he would be: Saint Nick himself towering over Nana’s five-foot-nothing frame, and Granddaddy snapping photos to document this meeting of legends.
In later years, once Santa was revealed to be my dad’s old chemistry teacher, Nana’s magic took on new forms. Suddenly, I was old enough for the good stories, the ones about her days in the CIA, heels in hand as she walked across town to her office in the Pentagon. Sure, she was a typist (what a flimsy cover story for a spy!), but to me she was a Kentuckian who had been places. I can’t overstate how big of an impact she had, to tell me about the whole world that was waiting for me out past the Green River.
I’ve spent the last few months traveling, nine new countries under my belt as I chronicle the impact of the pandemic around the world. As I travel, I look for the universals, the little bits of humanity that really do transcend our borders. One of these, my favorite of these, is the incalculable importance of little old ladies. I cannot stress enough how important little old ladies are to the success of the human race, how much the diminutive, gray-haired women I met on the road were usually the ones keeping the whole ship afloat.
In Mexico, it was a graceful abuelita who, after a fifteen-minute wait in the line for the Burger King ice cream counter, sauntered around to the main cashier and shouted, “¡Tu pendejo! ¡Estamos esperando nuestros conos! ¡Rapidamente!” Translation, “I am grandma, hear me roar.” Needless to say, we all got our ice cream cones in record time.
In Scotland, it was a woman in the Glasgow train station. “Aye, you must be missing home,” she said. I asked how she could tell. “Well, you’re singing, aren’t you?” Only a grandmother sees so clearly into the hearts of strangers.
In Spain, it was a Dutch woman, a retired attorney who had closed up her house in Amsterdam and walked over a thousand miles to the village of Sarria, where I happened to join her table in a crowded cafe. She had less than a week left until she reached her destination, the cathedral city of Santiago de Compostela.
“And what’re you gonna do when you get there?” I asked.
“What a silly question, young man. I’m going to turn around and walk home!”
Can you believe the poise, the wisdom, the strength these women carry?
Can you imagine the things they’ve seen, the work they’ve done?
Aren’t they incredible?
Incredible, much like Mary Christmas, who passed away in 2019, a few weeks shy of her 80th birthday. This year, I will think of her, and hold my other grandmother tight. This year, I hope you find the time to appreciate the little older women in your life. They are, after all, the ones who made it all possible.
Barton Christmas is a freelance writer based out of Paducah, Kentucky. Over the next year, he is traveling to over a dozen countries as a Vanderbilt University Keegan Traveling Fellow. Keep an eye out here at The Courier Journal for periodic updates on his travels, follow his travel Instagram @KentuckyPilgrim or email bartonxmas@gmail.com to join his weekly travel newsletter, Kentucky Rambler.
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: How my Kentucky Grandmother became Mary Christmas: Opinion
